Mark,

McDonald’s uses a staggering 3.5 million plastic straws every single day — and that’s just in the UK. Used for a few seconds, then thrown away, many end up polluting our oceans.

Small, light, and hard to avoid, it’s no wonder plastic straws dumped into the sea get stuck in sea turtles’ nostrils, lodged in the stomachs of baby seabirds, and end up in our food chain after being eaten by fish.

Just recently a UK based pub chain stopped routinely giving out plastic straws — but its 100,000 straws per month is a drop in the ocean compared to McDonald’s 3.5 million a day habit.

Just image what a difference 3.5 million straws a day out of circulation would make to our oceans and the animals that live in them.

Plastic pollution is one of the biggest threats to our oceans, and straws are one of the most common plastic items found in beach cleanups, according to Greenpeace.

A total of 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our seas every year — that’s the equivalent to five shopping bags of waste on every foot of coastline in the world! And as a result it is estimated that every yeara million seabirds and 100,000 marine animals — such as sea turtles — die.

Plastic doesn’t degrade, but is broken up into ever smaller pieces. So if that straw isn’t swallowed whole by a large bird or turtle the bits it breaks into can be eaten by fish or fed to chicks starving to death with stomachs full of plastic.

Taking 3.5 million plastic straws per day out of use would be a major step towards cleaning up our seas and protecting wildlife from this plastic menace.

We’ve faced huge and powerful corporate players before, and we know that when SumOfUs members like you stand up for what’s right, together we can force them to change. After all we’ve done it before.

We’ve forced McDonald’s — along with companies like Starbucks, and KFC — to commit to sourcing 100% responsible palm oil. When we expose the ugly side of corporate giants — like McDonald’s — they take action to protect their brand. And in doing so we score a massive victory for our planet.